


What Sacrifice is Made

by 23Murasaki



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: (I guess?) - Freeform, Backstory, Blood, Blood Magic, Character Death, Gen, Headcanons Everywhere, Pre-Canon, dead bodies, this one's not happy y'all idk how else to tag it, tragic pasts for minor villains i suppose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27198187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/23Murasaki/pseuds/23Murasaki
Summary: A very young Ethan Rayne gets his first taste of magic on the edges of the Thames.(Or: Few, if any, are born wicked. Circumstances are no excuse, of course, but they may be something of an explanation.)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	What Sacrifice is Made

**Author's Note:**

> (Nearly every other character in this 'verse has a tragic past, and canon gives us next to nothing on Ethan's non-Giles-related backstory. I have... fewer regrets than I should.)

It's one of his mother's more lucid days, and she's well aware of it. Ethan can tell that she knows because she spends the entire morning doing things. Busy, busy, busy, hands flying and hair pulled back, fixing all the little things Ethan doesn't quite know how to fix on his own. He watches, though, and he learns. That's how he's always done it. Lucky he has a good memory. 

It's one of the few things about himself he genuinely likes, his memory. He only needs to see something once, properly, and he remembers it--the right pattern for striking a match to light a fire, the best way to cook something, how to pick someone's pocket, how to spell a word. His mother knows, and sometimes pats his cheek and calls him her little changeling. 

"Watch close now, little changeling," she says, fitting together new pipes for the sink. "Do you see how these match up? It's like a puzzle, see?"

"I'll remember," he says. "Next time I can do it."

"That's right," she says fondly. "You're such a help." 

Ethan is ten, but he isn't stupid, nor is he particularly naive. He knows he’s enough of a help to keep them out of the halfway houses, at least. He can cook and fix things and his mother’s savings and what he can scrape together are enough for the rent and Mr. Bedi helps with the papers. But he isn't a help, not where it matters, because after today, or maybe after just a few hours, she'll slip away again, physically there but mental somewhere where shadows are monsters and things keep hurting her. He has a good memory, so he remembers every word she screams. 

Today is a good day, though. No screaming. No fear. She even fixes lunch and takes him with her on the short walk to buy groceries, and he gets to pretend like they always do that together. It's a familiar path, anyway, down past the docks and up the street, past people he knows buildings that don't change, then down the street little Stacia lives on. 

Only Stacia isn't there. Stacia's always there, always in the same spot, always waving happily to passers-by. He always says 'good morning Stacia,' and she always answers 'good morning, you're Ethan!' and then he always says yes and she always laughs. It's routine. Then again, it's routine that he walks this way alone. Maybe Stacia has, against all odds, decided to try something new. 

He doesn't really think that, though, and the knowledge that Stacia isn't where she always is sits in his mind and doesn't go away. 

"Back on your feet, Miss Rayne?” Mr. Mitra, the grocer asks. "You're taking good care of your mum then, kid."

"Of course he is," his mother says, and makes small talk while picking out comparatively-less-bruised vegetables. 

It's normal, just for a little while, and Ethan can pretend that normal really is routine. The grocer packs his mother’s bags for her, grins, and slips Ethan a jalebi from the plate he always keeps behind the counter. His mother rolls her eyes. 

“Don’t take food from strangers, love,” she says, once they’re back on the street. 

“Mr. Mitra’s not a stranger,” Ethan points out. Mr. Mitra’s been there for years and remembers Ethan’s birthday. 

“No, he’s not,” his mother admits, smiling, “but you should–“ 

And then she freezes up in the middle of the street, eyes staring out ahead of her. The next thing she’ll do is drop whatever she’s holding, he knows, so he quickly rescues the groceries and sets them aside and gently takes his mother’s arm. 

“Mum, come on. Over—out of the street, maybe, over here–-“ But she looks through him, through Mr. Mitra’s store, and screams. That’s always how it starts, but it still makes him flinch every time. It makes him want to run every time, but something could happen to her if he ran so he stays and tries to calm her. Not that it has ever worked, but she screams and he tries to soothe and people on the street stare. 

“No–No, please no!” she wails. “Stop—please stop, please stop, she’s so little, please stop—no!” Another scream of pain, and then—familiar words. “Stop—get away from me! Get away from me!” And she hits Ethan across the face hard enough to send him sprawling. 

It’s okay. She doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. He knows that, because she’s still trying to fend off whatever it is she sees. It’ll go on until she runs out of energy, and then she’ll go all slack and limp like she’s sleeping standing up and he’ll be able to take her home. Like always. But maybe if he wishes really hard she’ll get tired quicker, because people are staring and he hates it when people stare like that. 

It’s more than an hour before she does quiet down, more than an hour of trying not to cry on the street because that’s the last thing he needs—tears and pity. He’s not a baby and he doesn’t need anyone’s pity. He needs a solution, not pity, but solutions aren’t forthcoming, so once she’s quiet he picks up the grocery bag and takes her by the arm and leads her home, head down and trying to ignore the world. Stacia still isn’t there to say ‘goodbye, I remember you’ like she always does, so he doesn’t speak at all. 

At home, his mother sits in a chair, blank-faced and staring into space, and he step-by-steps his way through making soup then counts the money left in his mother’s long-unused sewing kit. Not enough. Not even with scrap-metal money and the discounts from Mr. Mitra and whatever one-time jobs he can plead and sneak his way into. It could last them … three months, maybe, if he’s lucky. Two if he isn’t. And then what? He doesn’t want to think about that. Two months. Maybe he can turn it around in two months. Maybe someone needs a skinny ten-year-old who can remember everything and fix kitchen pipes. 

He wishes he were older. He could join the army if he were older, be a soldier, like he brags to the other kids in the neighborhood. He tells them his father was a soldier too, because he could well have been, couldn’t he? It was the War, there were lots of soldiers. There are fewer now that there isn’t a War anymore, but Ethan is sure there’ll be one again. Maybe they’ll fight the Communists now. Stacia’s older sister seems to think so. 

It’s dark out now, and ‘don’t go out in the dark, changeling,’ is one of his mother’s few direct instructions, but he’s too tired to sleep and thinking far too much about war and money and Stacia, so he slips out into the night with a murmured apology he doesn’t think his mother can understand. She’ll be still all night, and then the next day she’ll be talking to invisible things, arguing and pleading but at least not screaming. 

The night air tastes like freedom, and Ethan breaks into a run on the cracked and dirty sidewalk, though he’s not sure where he’s running to. Oh, no, wait. Yes he is. He’s running to the docks. That isn’t a good place to be in the dark, he knows that, so he slows to a walk instead and considers going somewhere else. He could knock on Stacia’s door. He could say, ‘Mr. Kowalski, I’m Stacia’s friend, is she sick because she wasn’t outside today.’ His feet lead him to the docks anyway, down past the fish smell and the broken bottles, and he thinks it’s sort of nice that the dockworkers aren’t around. They usually are. They’re usually drunk. 

Ethan picks his way to the very end of the pier, then sits, staring out over the water. Sounds are distant here, and he can almost ignore the fact that the lapping waves are pushing all sorts of junk around, rotting things and bottles and what looks like an entire doll, with hair and a sweater and everything. He doesn’t know why he reaches out to the doll — just within reach— and grabs it to pull it up. Only, no, wait. Yes he does. He does that because Stacia has a sweater like that, a sweater just like that and the same tangled brown hair, and when he pulls the heavy doll up onto the pier beside him it has Stacia’s face too. 

It has Stacia’s face and Stacia’s sweater and Stacia’s hair because it is Stacia, and it has a symbol cut into its stomach and a line cut across its throat because Stacia’s dead. She’s so little, he thinks, staring down at her body from what feels like very high up. She’s so little, and someone killed her. Ethan doesn’t know what to do, so he sits next to the body quietly until he is sure…well, he isn’t sure of what he’s sure, but after a while he gets up, goes home, and sits on his bed silently instead. He doesn’t think he can sleep at all, and he traces the symbol onto the wall with his finger over and over and over and over and over. 

In the morning, his mother is taking to empty air and tells him Aunt Irena has come to visit. He doesn’t have an Aunt Irena, but this is one of the usual invisible people so he offers the empty chair a polite hello and walks out. 

There are police at the docks, taking Stacia’s body away, and Ethan intercepts one of them with his best charming smile. He asks what happened, do they know what happened, who is it who died, even though he knows almost all of that. The man stares down his nose and says:

“Kid fell off the pier. Drowned. Accidents happen.” And that’s that. At home, Aunt Irena seems to have departed, and his mother pleads in her sleep that isn’t it enough? Isn’t it enough?

The next day it’s a girl from a different neighborhood missing, but Ethan still finds out because he asks too many questions and people like to talk. Another little girl with, people say, something wrong with her. Stacia was eight. This one is younger. Ethan tries to avoid the docks, but finds the second body anyway because what is he supposed to do, sleep? He can’t sleep and his mother is pleading with invisible things something in his bones, inside his bones hurts. The next day its Mr. Bedi’s niece, age nine, who couldn’t talk. People talk and shake their heads and call it a spate of drownings. They all pity the girls, but they don’t need pity. They need a solution. A solution isn’t forthcoming. 

The morning after Ethan fishes Mr. Bedi’s niece out of the water, a man with a posh accent and a mustache and a nice suit and shiny patent leather shoes is talking with the dockworkers. Maybe he’s a detective, Ethan thinks, but there aren’t any police there with him. He takes notes in a little book, nods, and leaves, and after that another girl goes missing. Ethan doesn’t know her, but he waits at the dock anyway because maybe if he waits he’ll be able to see what’s killing them. He has a knife from the kitchen and carves the symbol over and over again into the wood of the dock as he waits. He doesn’t know why he’s doing it. He hasn't slept in days. 

There are footsteps on the dock, and he snaps to attention, clutching the knife with both hands. From his hiding spot, he can see a figure in a red cloak carrying a limp, small body with curly black twin-tails, what he assumes to be the latest missing girl. Is she dead?

“I beseech you who stand in the shadow,” the figure in red intones. “Accept this sacrifice and cast open the gates before me. With this blood, may I be made holy. With this blood, may my servitude be sealed.” It sets the girl’s body in the air in front of it, and she hovers as it draws a knife that looks like it’s made of black stone. “I beseech you who stand in the shadows, look upon–“

“Let her go!” Ethan yells, and thinks maybe he would make a good soldier, maybe his father was a soldier. This is what soldiers do, right? “Let her go or—or I’ll fight you!” 

The thing in red wave a hand at him, and his kitchen knife jerks like it wants to fly out of his hands. He tightens his grip, and the force ends up throwing him too—off the dock and into the filthy water. He breaks the surface, spluttering and struggling, in time to see the thing in red slice the girl’s throat, still talking about sacrifices and servitude and holiness. It’s wearing patent leather shoes—oxfords, he remembers, they’re called oxfords.

He plunges his kitchen knife through light brown leather and into foot. The thing yells in pain, turns, drops the dead girl, and Ethan grabs an edge of its cloak and yanks with everything he’s got in him, and then he’s in the filthy, blood-laced water with the dead girl and a man with a mustache and a nice suit and a red cloak and a knife made out of black stone.

The man curses under his breath, then turns toward Ethan with an expression that makes Ethan’s blood turn cold in his veins. He’s suddenly very aware of the freeing water around him, of the blood on his clothes, of the dead girl floating like a broken and abandoned doll, and he flounders back, away, away, away. He’s so cold, and he’s scared, so scared it hurts and makes his vision blur at the edges. The man—the murderer with the nice suit and the posh accent—advances on him, moving through the water far more easily than an underfed and terrified ten-year-old could hope to despite his injured foot. 

“You,” the murderer snarls, and raises the hand with the knife. Ethan silently mirrors the image, thinking dimly that he’s going to die there. Who’s going to take care of his mother now? “You aren’t worthy of being a sacrifice to the Brilliant Ones!”

“The ones that stand in the dark,” Ethan says dully. The symbol is clear in his mind’s eye—why wouldn’t it be? He has a good memory. There is blood in the water, and it isn’t moving like blood is supposed to and he’s going to die because he interrupted some sort of ritual sacrifice. 

“Silence!” snarls the murderer, and lashes out at Ethan’s neck with the knife. He misses, barely, and Ethan nearly chokes on filthy water. “You know nothing!” That’s a lie, though. He knows a lot of things. He knows this ritual—after all, he only has to see it once. 

“I beseech you who stand in the shadows,” he says, and the words come easily. “Accept this sacrifice and let the gates open before me. With this blood, may I be made holy.” The murder freezes, mid-attack, as though he can see something Ethan can’t. Ethan can’t see much of anything, it’s gotten so dark. When has it gotten so dark? “With this blood, may my servitude be sealed. I beseech you who gaze upon this world from myriad angles, accept this sacrifice and let the gates open before me. With this blood–“ The water isn’t cold anymore. That’s nice. He’s been so cold. “–may I be made holy. With this blood, let me seal my servitude to you. I beseech you take that which I offer most humbly, and call upon me as your faithful servant…!”

The world doesn’t go black, then, as much as it goes in blinding, unfamiliar, brilliant color, but the net result is the same—he drops backwards into the shallow water, and neither sees nor thinks anymore.

———

He wakes up to pain like he’s never felt before, and unfamiliar voices talking above his head. 

“I told you there was something wrong with Durham,” says one, a man who sounds the same sort of icily posh as the murder had. “If any of you had listened to me, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Roger, you said yourself there wasn’t any proof.” That’s a woman, upper-class but clearly tired of the argument. “We have him now.”

“Fine job we did of it—how many dead girls?” Another man, sardonic. Academic. 

“None, as far as the police are concerned,” says the man called Roger. “And the families can be soothed with a payout. It’s the paperwork I’m concerned about. Once the Council-writ-large finds out you allowed him to operate for this long–“

“Oh, it won’t be your head on a plate and you know it,” says the academic. “The Council loves you. More pressingly, Mina—how do we deal with the boy?” Ethan tries very hard to look convincingly unconscious. 

“Kill him,” says Roger. “I don’t know what he knows, and we cannot afford to have him blabbing about it.”

“He wandered into backfiring invocation,” argues the woman. “Even if he remembers any of it, no one will believe him. Just a child’s flights of fancy.”

“As senior ranking member–“ Roger begins. Mina, the woman, cuts him off.

“And as senior field agent, I dislike killing children. The Council has done enough damage here. We’re leaving.”

“Outvoted, then, Roger,” says the academic mildly. “You will have to sate your bloodlust elsewhere.”

And they leave him there, lying on cold stone. And eventually Ethan gets up and slowly finds his way home, where his mother is having a mock-tea-party with invisible Aunt Irena, sipping from an empty cup and giggling and there is roughly two months’ rent in her sewing box and a pot of soup that’s mostly untouched. Routine. That’s routine, he tells himself, even though usually there is at least something in the teacups. He can come back to the routine.

No he can’t. 

He can’t because he can’t sleep anymore, and dreams of colors and places and things he doesn’t have words for when he tries. He can’t because he can hear them, thousands of faraway whispers in languages he doesn’t understand. He can’t because his mother stops eating all together, after a month, and screams and begs him not to poison her when he tries to feed her. He can’t because she dies before the two months are up, a terrified, wracked shadow, and her last words are to get the door because Irena brought some friends over. 

He can’t because when he does go and open the door for ‘Irena’, he swears something walks through, something he can only see out of the corner of his eye. 

So when his mother won’t wake, he packs everything he can—a change of clothes, some food, driftwood he has carved the Brilliant Ones’ symbol onto, a knife—writes a letter to Mr. Bedi saying that his mother is dead, and walks out into the night. 

The air, when it hits his face, carries the stink of the city. It doesn’t feel like freedom, despite the sudden lack of constraints. It feels like something else entirely, and it’s calling to him, so he breathes deeply and breaks into a run.


End file.
